


It’s still magic even if you know how it’s done

by middlemarch



Category: A Discovery of Witches (TV), All Souls Trilogy - Deborah Harkness
Genre: Cravings, Desire, Diana wants to know, F/M, Farmhouse, Heart-to-Heart, Love, Lust, Magic, Romance, Scents & Smells, Sharing a Bed, Vampires, Witches, back in Madison, it begins in...
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-19
Updated: 2019-08-19
Packaged: 2020-09-07 22:31:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20317078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: She wanted him, oh, how she wanted him. And he felt the same. But what was it really between them?





	It’s still magic even if you know how it’s done

“You’re thinking very hard, Diana,” Matthew said. His arm was loosely draped around her waist, the hand-pieced quilts drawn up over them. The house was quiet around them, content, and Diana supposed she ought to be as well.

“How can you tell?” she asked, feeling Matthew’s lips graze her shoulder, the nape of her neck, feeling his inhalation and the touch of his breath. “Does it change my scent?”

“No, but that’s a novel idea,” Matthew said, pressing closer to her. “I can just tell, you’re so still. Do you want to talk?”

“What’s the difference,” she began, then broke off. Once she asked, he’d answer and she’d know what he believed. There would be no turning away. “What’s the difference between desire and love?”

“Joy…and trust,” he replied without clarifying what she meant. That she was asking why he defined what there was between them as more than the most powerful lust, more than the most insatiable affinity. Beyond infatuation, beyond passion even.

“Tell me,” she said.

“In fifteen hundred years, only you, Diana, only you have given me such happiness, such exquisite communion. Beyond any carnal delight, encompassing every carnal delight,” he said, his voice uttering the word _carnal_ surely a sin by itself.

“Not every carnal delight,” she retorted and he chuckled.

“I cannot imagine coming to you in that way will be any less transporting. I don’t crave you to consume you—I long for you, for how being with you makes me whole, at peace,” he said. His voice was so low, yet she heard every word.

“That’s the joy then. What about the trust? I’m the only one you trust to master you, is that it? A witch--not like the other women?” Diana said. She was not jealous of women long dead, but something in the way Matthew had spoken of them was a thorn.

“You’re the only one I trust myself with. Not to be mastered, to be known. To come to me, to be drawn to me but still always asking questions, challenging me to answer,” he said, pausing. “Waiting sometimes and then not waiting at all,” he added, pulling her towards him so that she could see his face, the delicacy of his throat. 

“_Dieu du ciel_, your eyes are so blue,” he murmured. How could he sound so old and so achingly young in the same moment?

“How can you see? It’s so dark, there’s no moon,” she said.

“I don’t need the moonlight, _mon coeur_,” Matthew said.

“Because you’re a vampire?”

“Because you are my beloved.”

**Author's Note:**

> I'm struck, watching the series and reading the fanfic on AO3, how physically attracted Diana and Matthew are to each other but I find myself wanting Diana to push Matthew to explain what makes their relationship qualitatively different, beyond the fact that she's a witch. I feel like this story is basically the inverse to the PWP that Matthew and Diana lend themselves to so easily...
> 
> The title is from Terry Pratchett.


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